


Eyes Catch Alight

by inkandpaperhowl



Category: Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-01
Updated: 2014-07-01
Packaged: 2018-02-07 00:15:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1877850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkandpaperhowl/pseuds/inkandpaperhowl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dallet met Kaladin long before he was assigned to his squad (a brief headcanon).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eyes Catch Alight

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the first Cosmere Challenge: Cosmere Fandom is Still the Worst Fandom. In other words: oops, I made a sad.
> 
> (Also on Tumblr: http://ladyknightradiant.tumblr.com/post/90441264254/)

He’s a veteran soldier, Dallet. He knows battle, he knows death, he knows grief. He’s also pretty pragmatic by this point, and he knows the importance of getting the dead cremated as quickly as possible, not only from a respect-for-the-dead standpoint, but from a we-won’t-all-get-diseases-and-die standpoint, too. So after the really big battles, he always shames some of his squadmates into volunteering for burial detail with him. He does it right, of course, never loots the dead beyond looking for identification or tokens to send home to their families with their ashes. Always put a prayer in with them when they light the pyres. If it’s a big burial, sometimes they don’t all get individual prayers, but there’s always at least one per fire. He’s been doing this for a while, he knows what he’s doing. 

Anyway, there’s this massive battle, and Dallet puts on his stony face and gets to work. He’s always found a sort of peace in the quiet of the battlefields after the blood has been spilt. The burial crew from the other army nods respectfully at him and his group, and they nod back, occasionally lending a hand to each other but mostly staying out of the way. They ignore the fact that they spent the morning trying to kill each other and focus on the sad task at hand. 

Dallet stumbles onto a hollow in the ground, almost tripping over two boys there. He’s startled to find one of them is alive, and sobbing, and clutching the other to him. There’s an awful lot of blood in the hollow. He lowers himself down and gently reaches out a hand to the weeping boy, resting it on his shoulder for a moment, alerting him to his presence. The boy does not notice. 

"Son," he says quietly, "I’m sorry." The boy looks up finally, and his eyes are a blazing mess of grief, anger, pain…there’s also determination there, buried underneath all that despair, but it’s barley a spark, and Dallet misses it completely, focusing on the helplessness, the disbelief, the suffering. He rests an arm around the boy’s shoulders, and whispers comforting words that don’t mean anything. Words his father said to him when his mother died. Words he said to his girls back home when their mother died. Words he said to himself when his girls died and he joined the army to turn his back on the grief. Words that won’t make it better, but need to be said anyway. 

The dead boy looks enough like the other that Dallet works out they were brothers. The spear thrust to the heart is enough to bring bile rising up in his throat: no child that young should have been anywhere near the front lines, should have been anywhere near where he’d even see a spear, let alone get skewered on one. That makes it harder to pry the older boy away, but eventually, with comforting words and more than a few embraces, he manages to pull the boy out of the hollow. 

"You’re going to do it properly, aren’t you?" the boy chokes out, and Dallet nods. 

"I promise, son," he says, "we’ll get him taken care of. Proper and prayed for. I swear." 

The boy nods, and swipes a hand across his face, trying to wipe away the tears. He does not succeed. Dallet knows those tears won’t be stopping for a while yet, but he doesn’t say anything. Just hands the kid a scrap of cloth that masquerades as a handkerchief and starts leading him back to camp. He gets him to his squad, who look up from their fire with worried expressions and sit the boy down for the dregs of a meal he won’t eat before bundling him into his bedroll and telling him to get some sleep. Dallet keeps an eye on him that night, forsaking his squad’s fire for a place nearer the boy’s. In the morning, the tears have stopped, and there is a numb look on his face. But he eats, and that’s something, so Dallet nods and takes his leave. 

He burns the younger brother on a separate pyre, away from the mass graves his crew had constructed for everyone else. He finds one of the sergeant’s wives and asks her for a proper prayer—not just a simple one-glyph thing one of his men scratched out on a scrap of paper, but a proper prayer, with all the right words painted on a long strip of cloth. He lights the pyre himself, and stands vigil as it burns higher and then down. He collects the ashes into a plain clay jar himself, before the wind can blow them away. The flashing, shiny rock that had been in the kid’s pocket and hadn’t burned he lays on top of the ashes before sealing the jar. The same sergeant’s wife paints a glyph on the outside of the urn, a seal of peace and hope that maybe this boy who died far, far too soon is at peace. Dallet finds a captain, and tells him about the boy, and makes sure the jar of ashes gets sent back to the parents. They deserve that much at least. 

He keeps an eye on the older brother for a week or two, but then his squad is transferred and then the boy gets promoted to a different squad and Dallet loses track of him. Eventually he forgets about him. There are a lot of kids in the army, and a lot of them die before their time. He does a few more burial details, and a few more kids get sent home in jars, and Dallet fights on. He’s getting a bit tired now, though, and old. He’s sick of watching kids die. Maybe it’s time he retired. 

Half his squad dies in one of the bigger border skirmishes, and what’s left of his crew gets folded into a smaller squad to bolster their numbers. It’s a bizarre little squad, half veterans, half kids barely old enough to be holding their spears. The kids die a lot, but they die less than those in the rest of the army, and Dallet is impressed with their determination, and their willingness to learn. He kicks into veteran mode full force and starts teaching the rookies a thing or two about formation and stance and survival. That evening, the squadleader returns from a meeting with some sergeants and Dallet is shocked to find that his new squadleader is barely older than the kids he’s training. Maybe nineteen. But the boy has something special; he’s got determination and resilience and even the set of his shoulders is inspiring. He’s a natural leader, and it’s obvious in about five minutes that he truly cares about his men, and looks after them, and protects them. Dallet thinks that this kid is probably the best thing to happen to this army, and thinks maybe he won’t retire just yet. He’d like to see the places this kid is going, and maybe go there with him. 

Dallet doesn’t recognize this glowing leader, this brilliant tactician, this fierce fighter as the boy he held in his arms as he cried over the corpse of his dead brother. In fact, he assumes that that kid has been long dead, and is probably better off somewhere else with the brother he had cradled so gently in a hollow in the earth. But this kid…this stormblessed squadleader…this Kaladin…he’s something special, he is. There’s fire in his eyes.

.

Kaladin returns from bribing another sergeant—this time for faster medic response mid-battle—to see his new sqaudmembers have arrived and already settled in around the fire. They’re mostly veterans, who are already showing his new boys a few things about their spears. A particularly burly man near the center of the group looks up as he approaches, and Kaladin is shocked to see that this is the same man who pried his cold hands away from Ti—the body  _that_  night. Kaladin sees no spark of recognition in the kind man’s eyes, though; he wonders how many boys this man has comforted over the years. He shakes his head, driving away the memory of  _that_ night. (He avoids thinking about it as much as possible. He never thinks about it, if he can help it.) All the better that Dallet doesn’t recognize him. If he did, they’d have to talk about it, and he..can’t. Won’t. (Can’t.) 

Kaladin is secretly incredibly pleased that this man has somehow, miraculously come to be under his command. It makes his job easier. He tries to save all the boys that remind him of Tien, but he’s not very good at it. It’s hard to do by himself. He can’t teach them everything and he can’t look after them all by himself. But now he’s got a second pair of eyes, a second set of hands, another good spear at his back. He trusts Dallet almost immediately. He knows from personal experience exactly how kind and generous Dallet is. He saves the boys from the other squads and sends them to Dallet, who doesn’t ask why or how or who. He simply folds them under his wing, just as he did for Kaladin, and shows them the finer points of surviving battle. 

Maybe Kaladin couldn’t save Tien, but he was alone then. Now that he’s got Dallet, maybe now he can save some of the others. 

.

Of course, we all know how well that works out. 

Cenn’s burned out body gets trampled under the horse’s hooves, and before Kaladin can move, Dallet’s eyes are burning, too. And he’s alone again. 

And he already knows that he can’t save them on his own. 


End file.
